by Elise Sax
Driving on the road in the middle of nature, I wondered how I could have let myself get so wrapped up in believing that Boone was a serial killer. After all, he was nothing like Rockwell. He was sweet and kind. On the other hand, Boone was strong, and he had found Amy. He’s closer than you think. There was no one closer than Boone. And the profiler report. Boone matched the profiler report to a tee. But then the report turned out to be baloney. So, what news did Silas have for me about the profiler report? Did they change their mind about it? Did they think it was now accurate? Was Boone the number one suspect now?
If he was, why was Amos acting so suspiciously? Why was he obsessed about his wife dying, but not about finding out how she died? What had been in the mysterious box? Why was Amos hiding out and not talking to anyone?
Oh no. Now, I was obsessed with the serial killer and Rockwell. Both were problems I couldn’t solve. I was doomed.
Damn it. My brain had gone full circle, and I was back to being despondent.
With my mind going a mile a minute, I didn’t see the hitchhiker until I almost ran her over. I swerved the car out of the way just in time, so I didn’t hit the young, pretty blonde girl, who was hitchhiking on the side of the road.
My heart pounded in my chest, and I tried to get it to calm down as I drove on. Why would a girl be hitchhiking out in the middle of nowhere? As if the universe was trying to prove me wrong, I was half-aware that a car passed me going in the other direction and then a pickup truck. So, it wasn’t in the middle of nowhere. It was a side road, but locals still used it. That made sense. It had been the main road years ago, and folks had probably gotten in the habit of driving on it.
I drove for another couple minutes and then a deep feeling of dread washed over me. It was different from the freak-out feeling or the obsessed feeling. This was a feeling like something horrible was about to happen.
And that something was my fault. I could have prevented it.
“The hitchhiker,” I said out loud. “A young blonde girl. Oh my God. What have I done?”
I made a quick U-turn. Silas’s tires screeched in complaint. I pressed my foot hard on the gas and drove as fast as I could to reach the girl.
But when I got back to the spot, I couldn’t find her. She was gone.
I drove back and forth where I had seen her, but she wasn’t there. I pulled the car to the side and searched the side of the road. I called out, in case she had gone into the forest, but nobody called back. Nobody came. I looked down on the ground, searching for clues, something that would tell me what happened to the girl and who she was.
She couldn’t have vanished without a trace. Somebody had picked her up. Could it have been the car or truck that passed me by? I wished I had paid more attention to them. If I had, I might have recognized them.
After searching for at least fifteen minutes, I sat down on the side of the road, defeated. I had passed the girl by, and now she was gone. I was responsible for what was going to happen to her.
But now I knew.
I knew how the serial killer was finding the girls. I knew it as sure as I knew anything else in my life. The killer was trolling this road. The road that ran near my house, the road that still saw traffic but quiet enough that he could be reasonably sure he wouldn’t be seen when he picked up the girls.
How many girls could there have been? Depending on how long the serial killer had been killing, there could be hundreds. What did the girls have to do with Amos’s wife? She didn’t strike me as a hitchhiker, and she was older than the abducted girls. Was she actually one of the victims, or was her death completely unrelated? I shivered and hugged myself. I stood up and looked down the road. What was over there? Goodnight. The giraffe museum. My house.
Closer than you think.
The killer must have wandered this road every day, maybe a few times a day. The only murdered girl who was identified had been on her way to California. That made sense. The girl I passed had been going west. The killer would have had access to a whole parade of pretty blonde girls on their way to fame and stardom in Los Angeles.
Then, what did the serial killer do? He picked them up and he attacked them in his car? Did he drug them? Did he somehow convince them to go home with him? I didn’t know the series of events, but I did have a fairly good idea what he did once he got them to his lair. He hurt them. He locked them up. He killed them.
And now there was a young girl on her way to his place. The clock was running. I didn’t have a lot of time to save the girl.
But I was going to save the girl. Nothing else mattered. Not Boone, not Rockwell, not anything. I was going to find out who the serial killer was, no matter who it was, and I was going to save the girl.
And I was going to do it today.
I gathered my troops at Goodnight UFOs. When I made the emergency calls to my three best friends, they jumped into action to help me. Adele closed down the diner, despite protests from the early breakfast eaters. Nora drove her food truck away from her customers, dropping her cousin off at the curb with a box of tamales. Unfortunately, Nora was terrible at driving her food truck, so she had parked in front of Goodnight UFOs with two tires on the sidewalk and two tires on the road. Faye canceled her contractor jobs for the day. Luckily, Goodnight UFOs wasn’t open yet, so we met in the main area of the shop between the Venutian love beads and the Martian divining rods.
“What’s up?” Nora asked, her voice low, like we were the French Resistance, plotting to blow up the Nazi headquarters.
I told them about Rockwell’s appearance and his threats to sell the Gazette, get rid of the dogs, and take half of everything I owned.
“Holy crap. You’ve got bad luck with men,” Adele said. “Two killers. Who would have thought?”
“We’re not sure that Boone is a serial killer,” Faye pointed out.
“Maybe Amos is though, right?” Adele said.
“Maybe,” I said. “But that’s not why I called you for help.” I told them about the vanished hitchhiker and my conviction that she had been taken by the serial killer. “That’s how he’s doing it. He’s picking up girls on the road.”
My three friends gasped in unison. “I wonder how long he’s been doing this,” Nora said.
“My thoughts exactly,” I said.
“Do you want us to patrol the road for the serial killer?” Adele asked. “Should I get my grenade?”
“No. If I’m right, he just picked up a girl, so he won’t be looking for another for a while,” I said. “I’m going to take on the serial killer thing, and I was wondering if I could get you guys to handle Rockwell.”
“You want us to kill him?” Adele asked, hopefully.
“I could kneecap him with my hammer,” Faye offered.
“I appreciate your offers to maim and kill him,” I said. “I would love him to be maimed and killed, but I don’t want anyone doing anything illegal. I don’t want you to wind up in prison. But if you can figure out some way to make him head for the hills, sign the divorce papers, and give up his plans to ruin my life, that would be great.”
“That sounds easy. We’re good at making men run away,” Nora said.
Adele nodded. “I have a lot of experience with that.”
“This is not your average ordinary man,” I explained. “He’s a sociopath. He’s wily and determined. I have no idea how to get rid of him. I was on my way to a lawyer.”
“We’ll get it done,” Faye told me. “You save the girl, and we’ll make Rockwell crazy. And one of us will meet with the lawyer for you.”
“Just be careful,” I urged her. “He’s already crazy.”
“Oh, please,” Adele said. “We live in Goodnight. We’re old hands at crazy.”
I texted them all photos of Rockwell so they would know him when they saw him. It didn’t take long to see him. When we finished the meeting and walked outside, Faye spotted him walking down the street.
“I’m on it,” Nora said and jumped into her food truck. She bounced the t
ruck off the sidewalk and started to follow Rockwell down the street at five miles an hour.
“What is she doing?” Faye asked.
“Reconnaissance. Following him,” Adele said.
“Well, the way she drives, Rockwell isn’t long for this world,” Faye said.
“That’s true,” Adele said. “If she’s going to follow him around in her food truck, it’s just a matter of time before she mows him down.”
“But let’s not take any chances,” Faye said excitedly. “We’ve been training for this our whole lives. Let’s get him!”
Chapter 11
While my friends terrorized Rockwell, I headed back to the Gazette office. I was surprised to find that Silas wasn’t there. Klee explained that he had borrowed her car to cover a story.
“What story?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “Beats me. Are you working today?”
“Still on the serial killer story.”
“That’s three days in a row where I don’t have you to cover news in this town,” she complained. “I’ve got a guy walking around Goodnight for a record, a naked guy on a roof, and a convicted killer who moved to town, and I’m a reporter short.”
“I thought the naked guy stand-off was done,” I said. “I saw them take him away yesterday.”
Klee shook her head and typed something on her computer. “Nope. He slipped away at the diner after he finished his chicken fried steak. I guess naked people are hard to catch. He’s been moving around roofs all day today. They spot him on one, and then he disappears, only to show up on another roof.”
Jack came in and sat down at his desk. “Are you talking about the mooner? Slippery little bugger. I guess it’s hard to catch naked guys.”
“Matilda is still working on the serial killer story, so you’re going to have to pick up the slack,” Klee told Jack, tattling on me.
“That’s okay. Are you getting close?” he asked me.
“I’m going to find him today,” I told him, and then my throat closed, and I coughed violently. What was I saying? Yes, I wanted to catch him today, but how exactly was I going to do that?
I needed to talk to Silas about the profiler report. Maybe that would give me the much-needed clue I was looking for. I opened one of Silas’s drawers and then another. I found his file on the serial killer case in the bottom drawer and pulled it out. I put it on my desk and then went to the supply closet for a map of Goodnight and its surrounding areas. I draped it over my desk and sat down with the file.
Using a red Sharpie, I drew a line on the map from my house along the road where I saw the hitchhiker. Then, I circled everything of note along that path. Just like I had remembered, there was the Friends of Daisy Giraffe Home for Abused Wildlife and my house. I also knew that Mabel lived up the mountain from there, and I was reasonably sure that Rocco did, too. There was a lot of wilderness on the section of the map, and I had no idea what else.
With the map giving me precious little information, I moved on to Silas’s file. The first thing in the file was the picture of Devyn Jones, the eighteen-year-old girl that had been identified. She was from West Texas. The picture was the before picture. The one where she was relatively happy. The second was the dead Devyn Jones picture, totally unrecognizable from the other photo. Somehow, Silas had gotten a copy of the FBI’s interview with her mother. There wasn’t much useful information in it, just a bereaved mother of a beloved girl, who dreamed of leaving her small town for greater things in California.
Next in the file was the picture of the first dead girl. I studied it. There was something about it that bothered me, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Silas walked into the office. He took his suit jacket off, and his shirt was soaked through with sweat.
“What have you been up to?” I asked. “It’s fifty degrees outside, and you look like you just crossed the desert.”
“Don’t ask. Not a pretty story. What are you up to?” Silas asked.
He dropped his jacket on his chair, walked behind me, and looked over my shoulder. “Doing a deep dive?” he asked. “Nothing much in there.”
I pointed at the picture of the first girl. “Does this picture seem off to you?”
“She looks like she’s been murdered and dumped like she was trash. You mean that?”
No, it wasn’t that. I looked closer, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I flipped through the other papers. “Amy’s not in here.”
“They never thought of her as being one of the serial killer’s victims,” Silas said. “I’m not sure I do, either. Maybe it was a one-off.”
“A crime of passion?” I guessed. “Maybe. Do you have a file on Amy?”
“Sure thing, boss,” he said, and I followed him to the back room. Once we were there, he found the file and handed it to me. “Nothing much in there, either.”
I opened the file and skimmed the information. Most of it I had already seen. There wasn’t a photo of Amy after she died, but there was a photo of her alive and smiling, and there was another photo of a piece of land.
“Is that where Amy was found?” I asked Silas, showing him the photo.
“Yep.”
“It looks like the forest behind my house.”
“It’s not far from here, actually. The GPS coordinates are stamped on the picture.”
I made a note of the GPS coordinates on a scrap of paper and stuffed it into my pocket. Even though the picture didn’t give any clues about Amy’s death, I wanted to see in person where she was found. It didn’t escape me that it was closer than I thought.
“What did you want to tell me about the profiler report?” I asked.
Silas’s face brightened, and he hopped a couple times on his heels. “A source in the FBI told me that they did a new profiler report. He’s sending me a copy this evening.”
“Did he give you any idea what’s in it?”
“No. He hasn’t read it yet.”
I closed my eyes and made a wish that the new report didn’t describe Boone. “I guess I need to go see where Amy was discovered. I don’t have anything else to go on. What are you going to do?”
“I was thinking of giving Amos another go. I’m going to go over there and pretend I want to talk to him about the guy who’s mooning everyone in town.”
“What were you working on before?” I asked him.
“When?”
“Before you got here. You borrowed Klee’s car, and you looked pretty worn down. What story were you covering?”
“Oh, that.” Silas seemed to think for a moment. “Just something I’m working on. A feature story.”
My skin prickled, and warning bells went off in my head. It wasn’t like Silas to be coy about his stories. Usually, he liked to go into great detail and regale me with how journalism was saving the world from tyrants.
But he had gone to work on something important, something that took him away and made him exert himself, and now he was being secretive about it.
Something at the exact time that the hitchhiker went missing.
Did that mean that Silas was another suspect? I thought it did. I locked eyes with him, trying to tell if there was a serial killer lurking somewhere in his psyche. I couldn’t tell, but I was pretty sure that he was at least hiding something from me.
Drat. I didn’t want Silas to be a serial killer. I liked Silas. Silas took a bath in my bathtub every evening. Silas was my mentor at work.
And Silas had the file on the murders and was my only source about the profiler report. What if he had been lying and hiding evidence this whole time? What if he had pointed me down the wrong paths?
What if he had emptied Amos’s box before showing it to me?
I was dumbstruck by the revelation that Silas may be the serial killer. He’s closer than you think. Silas was closer. He was standing right in front of me. He had lived in Goodnight his whole life. His personal life was a mystery. I didn’t even know where he lived. Did he live near where Amy was found?
I stumbled backw
ard, and Silas reached out to stabilize me. “Are you all right?”
“Fine,” I said, careful not to meet his gaze. “I should be going now to check out that patch of land near my house.” My phone rang. I pulled it out of my pocket and waved it at Silas. “Got to take this,” I said without looking to see who was calling me.
Silas went back to his desk, and I answered the phone. It was Mabel.
“Come to Goodnight Flowers,” she commanded without saying hello.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“It’s an emergency. Get here quick!” she yelled and hung up.
An emergency. With everything going on, an emergency could have meant anything. It could have meant that Boone was caught strangling a young girl in the Plaza. It could have meant that Rockwell was stabbing Boone to death in the Plaza. It could have meant anything. The flowers angle was a new one to me, but I wasn’t past believing that evil could lurk in a flower shop, too.
I still didn’t have my car, so I had to walk to Goodnight Flowers, which was located on the Plaza. I grabbed my purse and sweater and left the Gazette office. Tilly was in the courtyard, carrying another large metal contraption, but this time it wasn’t a bear trap.
“I got your back, Matilda,” Tilly called me over.
As I got closer to her, I could tell what she was carrying. “Is that a pin changer?”
She nodded, excitedly. “It’s the bowling pin gizmo that tried to eat me alive.”
Holy crap. She was right. It was the bowling pin gizmo that had nearly killed her. “How did you get it?”
“I pinched it, of course. Serves them right for almost doing me in. I’m going to trap Rockwell with it.” She told me this information with unbridled glee, like she had discovered the cure for polio and bad breath. “I didn’t think he would fall for the bear trap. He’s more cunning than Silas. So, I pulled out the big guns.”
“Goodnight Bowling just let you walk out with one of their pin changers?”
She nodded. “I told them I was with the AARP. People don’t like to question old folks. They don’t like to get too close to us because we smell.”